Some known LTE cellular networks rely on tunneling mechanisms. In these networks, for each user, several tunnels are set up for its data to travel through the network core and reach the Internet. These tunnels may enable mobility, billing, and legal intercept. In order to provide the signaling involved with the tunnel setup and termination as well as the state associated with the tunnels, very powerful specialized hardware such as for example, serving gateway (SGW), PDN gateway (PGW), and mobile management entity (MME) may be required, This architecture does not facilitate caching of content close to the user. Further, this architecture does not facilitate “local breakout” of data, which means that all data may need to travel through several network elements into the network core, before it can be routed to the Internet.
Recent data collected from operating LTE networks shows that the median connection duration for a user equipment (UE) is 13 seconds. Moreover, 97% connections use 1 cell only (no session mobility), 2.7% connections use 2 cells, and only 0.3% connection use 3+ cells. This observed pattern may be partly due to push notifications sent to the UEs by a multitude of applications. This observed behavior suggests that most sessions are short lived, and that many sessions are created and terminated each time a mobile device accesses the network. Once voice calls are carried over LTE, the number of connections that use more than one cell might increase because voice calls tend to be longer duration connections. Conversely, with the increase of machine to machine (M2M) type communications, LTE networks and other cellular networks may be faced with several orders of magnitudes more endpoints than today. A large number of the M2M communications may include sending a tiny amount of data every few minutes, hours, or days without any mobility involved. As a result, today's tunneling based approaches may be overwhelmed with this signaling explosion because of the overhead involved in setting up and terminating the tunnels needed for such communication.
Existing cellular networks have been designed with the assumption that UEs are mostly idle and rarely active, but if they become active they are fast moving.